The View From Mid-America

I live in a land called Mid-America. Here, we want less government involvement in our lives. And we're mostly non-elite, working middle-class. "I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." Thomas Jefferson

Monday, November 28, 2011

The following material from the Media Research Center. It's indicative of why compromise with the left is impossible. How is it possible to compromise with people who think and talk like this?

“The utter confusion in the Republican presidential nominating process results from two discernible facts. One: they hate. That’s the simplest explanation of the disastrous course of this selection process. They hate so much they are not in the mood to fall in love with a candidate or even fall in behind someone. Their brains, racked as they are by hatred, they lack the ‘like’ mode. They are in no mood to go around looking around for a politician they like. The hating is so much more satisfying.”— MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Hardball, November 15.

Sad thing for this confused man is that he actually believes what he says.

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HBO’s Bill Maher: “You’ve got to feel very bad for Mitt Romney. I mean, he’s been led, so far, by Trump, then Bachmann. Then Perry. Then Cain.”Host George Stephanopoulos: “But, he kinda hangs in there. He’s everyone’s second choice.”Maher: “I’m rooting for him. You know? Because, look, in a country with only two political parties, the Republican can always win. I mean, at least he eats with a knife and fork. I mean, he is all that stands between us and the rise of the apes.”— ABC’s Good Morning America, November 14.

So who's filled with hate? The sad part about this is that Bill Maher is a joke, yet gets to say this kind of stuff on network TV.

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“When I point out that Sarah Palin is a vainglorious braggart, a liar, a whiner, a bully who sells patriotism like a pimp, and the leader of a family of inbred weirdos straight out of The Hills Have Eyes, that’s not sexist. I’m saying it because it’s true.”— Bill Maher, as quoted in a November 21 Newsweek profile of the HBO Real Time host.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Favorite line of Democrats when it comes to the failure of the supercommittee: It's the Republican's fault! Well, facts don't really back this up.

First of all, depending on which report you read, the Republicans on the supercommittee were willing to accept anywhere from $250 billion to $500 billion in additional revenue (translated as tax increases). But the Democrats wanted $1 trillion.

Secondly, the Democrats really didn't support any spending cuts. John Kerry, a member on the committee, admitted on MSNBC that the cuts the supercommittee Democrats were proposing were actually just a slowing of the rate of growth of government and not actual cuts.

If only there was no profound (insert word “partisan” here) and angry disagreement over how to find a detour from the road to financial oblivion. If only the Democrats would agree to cut the size of government. If only the Republicans would agree that big government is the answer. If only pigs could fly.

But they can’t, and neither can the partisan divide be bridged by a pontoon, however well meaning the pontoon men may be. Money is only part of what the debate is fundamentally about. Big government, designed to grow ever bigger with the turning of the seasons, is what the modern Democratic Party is all about. The Democrats are committed to building a bigger trough. The Republicans are committed to dismantling troughs. It’s all in the DNA.

President Obama is not to blame. He is a true believer in the European model of the welfare state. Everybody who was listening learned that three years ago. The fact that the European welfare states are crashing is irrelevant to him; true believers are never rattled by facts, not even facts that slap them in the face like a cream pie. The opportunity to impose a failing welfare state on America is what drew him to the presidency in the first place. The congressional elections last year, the Republican rout that Mr. Obama rightly called a “shellacking” of his party, made no impression, either. The results were all about cutting taxes and dismantling government, but not to Mr. Obama. Those elections were merely a few pebbles in the road to Utopia.

And here's an interesting chart, especially for all of you out there still ranting "it's Bush's fault!"

Please note that the deficits, by fiscal year, don't include FY2011, in which the deficit was $1.3 trillion. Bush averaged $266.7 billion a year, while Obama's average is $1.33 trillion.

These people really don't even know what they are protesting about. Wall Street? Banks? If they're mad about their economic situations, they mostly have themselves to blame, or the university they attended. They were scammed. They should be protesting their universities, their professors who sold them a lot of crap. Or they should be on the steps of Congress, which for the last 40 years has created a mess of of things.

Obama loves them too. Go figure. He recently said that the occupiers were the "reason he ran for office." Give me a break. He ran for office because he is a narcissist and wanted the power. All he's done is make it harder for people like the occupiers to succeed (of course if they'd quit protesting, cut their hair and take a bath, and start looking for work, they'd be better off, but I digress).

Now, I'm not defending the banking industry per se. There is much to be fixed, and neither Democrats nor Republicans have fixed the industry. Probably made it worse.

But when you embrace anarchy, theft, sexual assault and rape, and even murder, which all have happened at many of the "camps," then you don't belong in Congress or the White House.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Liberals will be in denial (and are), but the real reason the committee failed to compromise on budget cuts is not the intransigence of the GOP, but the desire of Democrats to raise taxes. Obama and the Dems have tried to raise taxes all year, but the GOP hasn't budged. Sometimes NO is a better answer than YES. If you're a parent, you'll understand that.

Even if Republicans agreed to every tax increase desired by the president, our national debt would continue to grow uncontrollably. Controlling spending is therefore a crucial challenge. The other is economic growth and job creation, which would produce the necessary revenue to fund our priorities.

In the midst of persistent 9% unemployment, the committee could have enacted fundamental tax reform to simplify the tax code, help create jobs, and bring in over time the higher revenues that come with economic growth. Republicans put such a plan on the table—and even agreed to $250 billion in new revenue by eliminating or limiting most of the deductions, credits, loopholes and tax expenditures mainly enjoyed by higher-income Americans. We offered this to avoid the even larger tax increases already written into current law that will intensify the pain Americans are feeling during these difficult economic times.

Republicans were willing to agree to additional tax revenue, but only in the context of fundamental pro-growth tax reform that would broaden the base, lower rates, and maintain current levels of progressivity. This is the approach to tax reform used by recent bipartisan deficit reduction efforts such as the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission and the Rivlin-Domenici plan.

The Democrats said no. They were unwilling to agree to anything less than $1 trillion in tax hikes—and unwilling to offer any structural reforms to put our health-care entitlements on a permanently sustainable basis.

Unfortunately, the committee's challenge was made more difficult by President Obama. Since the committee was formed, he has demanded more stimulus spending and issued a veto threat against any proposed committee solution to the spending problem that was not coupled with a massive tax increase.

The GOP has passed 15 pieces of job creation legislation this year, but the Dems in the Senate have refused to even vote on them.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

The charts are misleading, because the top chart is over more than 200 years, while the bottom chart is over only about 10, but look at the top right corner of the top graph: it drops, and appears to stay flat for the rest of the chart. The bottom graph is a magnification of just that section, and shows how flat temperatures have been for the last ten years (and a substantial dip right at the end — this could be a cold winter, folks.)

Of course, the problem with that is that the CO2-forced anthropogenic global warming models all say temperatures should be increasing steadily, not taking 10-15 years off. Now, not that this isn’t a disproof: there are other possibile explanations, but it is evidence against the simple models that ought to be explained, not hidden.

Actually, the average temperature over the last 50 years has increased 1.6 degrees. If it continues, that is about 3 degrees per century, not the 10-15 degrees claimed by many. Go back 1000 years. The planet was warmer than it is today. Go back 85 million years. It was a lot warmer than today. Explanation? There are only hypothesis, not proof.

For those of you who think the debate on global warming (climate change) is over, as per Mr. Gore, you need to realize that when scientific debate is closed, it becomes more like a religion than scientific investigation.

The climate has always been changing. Most likely always will, but I -- and you -- can't prove a thing.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

An economic recovery bill authored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D.-Conn.) seeks to empower struggling families by directing the federal government to distribute free diapers through day care centers.

The Diaper Investment and Aid to Promote Economic Recovery Act (DIAPER Act) would “relieve some of the stress on families facing hardship in this economy” by providing this direct service, DeLauro said in a letter to congressional colleagues urging them to co-sponsor her bill.

Responding Wednesday from the Senate floor to a question about a new Democrat plan to raise taxes on working Americans to pay for another $35 billion bailout for the states and public employee unions, Reid said:

"It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers, and that's what this legislation is all about."

No, we're not making this up. The comment is utterly wrong, of course, and underscores Democrats' cluelessness and insensitivity to the damage they've inflicted on the private economy since taking power in 2006.

It was on Tuesday during a speech at the University of Pennsylvania where Biden initially argued that another round of government spending was needed to prevent sexual assaults. “It’s not temporary [administration’s proposed stimulus] when that 911 call comes in and a woman’s being raped, if a cop shows up in time to prevent the rape. It’s not temporary to that woman.” Then in the same speech he wished Republicans were themselves rape victims. “I wish they had some notion of what it was like to be on the other side of a gun, or [to have] a 200-pound man standing over you, telling you to submit.”

Biden’s demagogic language aside, police budgets are the responsibility of each individual state, not federal bureaucrats. And as Ed Morrissey at HotAir notes, the President’s “jobs” bill doesn’t go directly to hire police officers anyway. Instead, “it allows states to paper-over budget gaps for another year rather than address their systemic budgetary issues, and protect unionized bureaucrats whose jobs should be on the chopping block.”

The exchange between the vice president and HUMAN EVENTS was taken on Wednesday after Biden gave a speech calling for yet another government stimulus program. This one is union-backed, and aimed at getting teachers and public-sector employees back to work.

And of course, Obama is out there saying crap like this:

"My plan says we’re going to put teachers back in the classrooms, construction workers back to work," President Obama said at a campaign event today. "Tax cuts for small businesses, tax cuts for hiring veterans, tax cuts if you give your workers a raise –- that’s my plan."

The Republicans plan, Obama says, boils down to this: 'Dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance.'

Actually, Mr. Obama, the Republicans want to quit spending money we don't have. If nearly a trillion dollars of "stimulus" money didn't work, why would $480 billion work? If you think the anyone with half a brain believes you, wait until November 2012.

And people think it's the Republicans, who haven't actually had control of Congress since late 2006. That's five years of Democratic rule. So if you think it's the Republicans, you really are clueless.